


Erratic

by HellsPurestDevil



Series: Project Mythicus [1]
Category: Hamilton - Miranda, Hamilton - Miranda (Broadway Cast) RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - SCP Foundation, Gen, Ghost Sickness, Ghosts, Gore, Mythical Beings & Creatures, Paranoia, Paranormal, Salt and Burning, Supernatural - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-02
Updated: 2018-10-02
Packaged: 2019-07-23 15:29:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,554
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16161713
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HellsPurestDevil/pseuds/HellsPurestDevil
Summary: A routine salt-and-burn turns into anything but, when Thomas starts to act and feel different.





	Erratic

He pads across the room, eyes flickering over the smooth, bright floorboards. They're clean, as everything in the house is clean. No scratches or scuff marks, no suggestion that any animal or child ever walked across its surface.

Thomas knows better than to trust it, any of it—It's only three months since he's been on this job and already he knows not to trust the beautiful floors, the creamy unstained walls, the simple furniture. He pauses at the entrance to the kitchen and stares at the stainless steel fixtures and ivory counters. The silence is real, alive. It sits in the empty spaces, huge and serene.

He rubs at his throat as he climbs the stairs. He's felt a dry ache coming on for a couple of days now, but it hasn't affected his mobility much. The stairs are dark hardwood, and he puts his feet down on each one with a little more force than necessary. He imagines the house shuddering a little with every step, but it's probably just the vibrations in his bones.

He's not sure what he's looking for but he'll  know when he finds it.

He's standing in another white room when She finds him, a little while later. Thomas hears her stomping up the stairs, but doesn't turn. He doesn't really move at all. She comes to stand beside him, and after a moment he shifts from foot to foot, making the floor creak.

"...oh," she says finally, faintly, and Thomas does turn then, flashing briefly on his partners face before turning away. Back to the closet, the wide open door. The space inside like the gap of a knocked-out tooth.

The bloody handprints all over the walls, at just the right height for a ten year old girl.

_______

An hour later at the morgue, Angelica accidentally brushes against his arm, and Thomas knows the exact moment when she registers his elevated body temperature.

"Shit!" She blurts, springing away and holding up a warding hand, staring with wide eyes "You're _getting_ sick! You're _sick_! Why didn't you tell me?"

Thomas glowers and doesn't dignify Angelica's freakout with a response. Asshole that he is, the woman refuses to come any closer, and holds her ground a good twenty feet away. She levels a shaking finger.

"You should have told me."

Thomas opens his mouth to deliver a witty retort-old habits don't die hard after all- but his throat sticks and he clears it, then turns away and coughs and swallows and claps a hand to his neck, squeezing his glands. Fuck it anyway. It's not like either of them gets sick all that often.

Now that he thinks about it, that's probably the reason Angie's freaking out, actually.

"Stop being a little bitch," he bites out, rounding on his partner, and if his voice is a little raspier than usual, well, he hopes that'll only make Angie fall in line that much quicker.

Unfortunately, Angelica seems to have no desire to get within twenty feet of Thomas and his current 'condition,' and remains firmly planted on the far side of the tiled floor.  
"We can't both be down with it at the same time," She says, in a passable attempt at sounding reasonable. It doesn't work, Thomas just narrows his eyes.

"Scared I'm gonna infect your sorry ass?" He waves sharply at the door, and piles on the scorn. "Christ, you giant baby, if you're that scared of germs then you can just fuck off, and I'll finish up with Mommy Dearest here myself."

Angelica's taken back, Thomas words bite about as much as she is doing to her lip. This isn't his normal banter. She never knew him to be hostile, Witty and Self-Dependent, maybe. But the sudden bark in his bite is not enough to get her to approach and let Thomas hack all over her. Dammit she had never missed a day at work before, and she refuses to start now.

"Go on, get." Thomas jerks his head at the double doors, then closes one eye hoping the lightning bolts of headache pain subside. Angelica wavers, but it's pretty clear she has no desire to be near Thomas, Thomas's mounting fever, his clamminess and sore throat, or any of the rest of his recently acquired germy symptoms.

' _Let his bitterness be damned_ ' she thinks. She let it slide for now, and moments later, Thomas is alone in the morgue with nothing but the dead body of the late Jamie Corcoron's mother, and the sound of the door swooshing open and swinging softly back and forth.

It's kinda soothing, actually.

____

"So," Angelica picks at her Chinese food and peers at her notes, "It's definitely the girl doing it? Killed her mom and dad and had a try at the nice realtor lady for dessert?"

Thomas is draped across his too small of a motel-bed with an arm flung across his face, mouth open and panting lightly. His throat is on fire and his skin is that lovely combination of hot and clammy that makes him wonder if maybe he'll go down in history as the world's soggiest case of spontaneous human combustion. He's barely paying attention to Angelica, and judging by the quality of his partners conversational gambits, it's probably just as well. He lets a grunt stand in for his usual snappy retort.

" _God_." Angelica pushes her food across the table and shoves to her feet. "You're just going to be insufferable the whole time you're sick, aren't you?"

Thomas peels his arm away from his eyes and glares. He's a little mollified to see Angelica blanch when she gets a good eyeful. He must look even worse than he feels.

"C'mere," he slurs, gesturing weakly. "Got a little present for you." There's that snide look on his face with that familiar lip over the fang curl .

Her lip curls as well, but to her credit, she doesn't actually flee this time.

"It came on pretty fast," she observes, leaning against the motel room door, arms folded. "You think it's just a cold?"

"Fuck-knowing this job, Plague," Thomas returns, rolling over and burying his face in the comforter. "Fucking—Bubonic black death avian swine flu. Flying pigs. Ringarounnarosie."

God, he _aches_.

Somewhere twenty miles away, Angelica muttering about Ghosts or some shit and about leaving him here to wallow in germs while she worries about the salting and burning this time. Thomas just curls a little tighter. The prospect of going outside makes him realize He was wrong before. Forget spontaneous human combustion, he's gonna freeze into a block of fucking ice, and then Angelica's gonna have to cut chips off and carry them around in her pockets and Jesus, where the fuck did that thought come from?

He hates being sick. Next time it can be her turn.

No....actually no...that's cruel, not her.

Angelica has suddenly got her hand on the back of Thomas's neck, all long fingers and broad, flat nails. The light shines sickly pale on their surface and Thomas suddenly remembers out of nowhere that nails and hair are made of dead cells. That the outer layers of skin are all dead. A walking body is covered in a sheath of death. He slaps relatively lightly at Angelica's hands, tries to move himself away.

"Stop it," he grits thinly, "Stop it."

"You're a goddamn grown-ass man," Angelica growls "Stop acting like a child."

Thomas grabs the sudden thermometer, plastic and shiny metal tip (dipped in alcohol? Did they remember to clean it last time they used it?), and practically shoved himself back. "Don't _touch_ me. Get off. Christ it's _too hot_."

Angelica backs up, scowling, but they have in fact established that Thomas is a goddamn grown-ass man. He eyes the thermometer warily. Should he wash it first? Is it clean? Who the hell cares what his temperature is, anyway? He's not gonna die from a fucking fever. He tosses the offending instrument on the night table and flashes a glance at Angelica, but his partners already across the room, glowering at her notes. Thomas can't tell if she's even registered the little plasticky tinkly noise. Which is just as well.

He just wants to fucking sleep.  
\-----

Angie smells like fire.

Stinks of charred bones and roasting flesh and god knows what else. Accelerant and phosphorus. White phosphorus. Red phosphorus. All the colors of the goddamn rainbow phosphorus. Thomas watches through slit lids as she collapses in the chair next to the door. It creaks, alarmingly and Thomas wonders if it'll break even under her own weight.

"It's done," she says, "Jamie's not going to hurt anyone else."

Thomas huffs in agreement, lets his eyes slide closed. The beds trying to crawl away underneath him and he digs his fingers in. He registers the outside world in fits and starts. Noise and air. Rustle of material. Hum of the lights. Angelica's moving across the room. Resting fingertips on the back of Thomas's shoulder.

"We have to stay here for a while, company policy" she murmurs, and Thomas stiffens and turns away from the distorted noise, the vibrations buzzing around the edges of the words.

Angelica keeps her fingers on his shoulder longer than she really needs to.  
_____

Angelica's cleaning. Trying to get the smell of burning corpse off her clothes.

The light's on in the bathroom, and the fan hums low and continuous. The smell of smoke still hangs in the air, vapor-thin, but the odor of detergent is gradually pushing it away and Thomas is not sure what's worse at the moment. He hears her slap her shirt against the side of the bathtub, and the world fades out and when it comes back Angelica is wringing out her shirt and cursing quietly, and the noise of water and soap suds spattering on plastic fills the world.

He eyes the coffee table, and knocks the thermometer onto the carpet with a dull thump. Carpet. God. He can _smell_ it, now, _toxic_ and moldering, pregnant with corruption and crawling with _things_.

Thomas knows all about the things that live in motel rooms, the thousand of uninvited guests. He's woken up more than once marked with red spots or little welts, or just generally _itchier_ than when he'd gone to bed. Like the bed he's in now. Full of tiny legs, little wings, scales and faceted eyes

He sits up and hangs onto the edge of the bed with dry hands, fingers stinging and skin shivering. He can't be here. He can't let things go on like this. Something has to be done. He has to do something.

He finds his feet and pushes both hands down his face. Dry. _Hot_ and dry. And he hurts from the inside out, hollow in places where he used to be full. His guts are being pulped, maybe. No other explanation. His insides are going to drip thick and clotted black from his nose, eyes, mouth and ears. Out of his every orifice, gobbets of flesh, pulped bone. Ruin.

Bodies where supposed to be like temples. Isn't that what they say. Then why did his feel like a old whorehouse five days from being condemned,

He wants to swallow but can't. His lips rest parted, cracking and dry. The air tastes of sickness, about as hot and as sour as rot. Every breath draws it in, caking his lungs in hot sour rot. His throat spasms, aborted desperation. He takes a step toward the door, then another. He wants to run but his skin is too thin. Too much movement and it'll crack apart and fall around his feet and all his guts will come spilling out.

He lifts one arm, fingers grasping at air. Takes another step.

Hands clamp on his shoulders, hard heavy slaps that jolt through his body and he flinches sharply.

"God," the voice claims, voice too large, jagged in the wrong places, "You're a furnace."

He tries to pull away but the voice follows, and it's hands dig in, fingers deep into the flesh, into muscle and skin as soft as wax. Adrenaline stabs upward from Thomas's belly and his arms jerk on their own and this time he lunges forward, but Angelica's fingers are cracking through bone and suddenly the world tilts and the walls are the ceiling and the floor is gone and Thomas is once again on his back blinking up, sucking in short dry breaths, blinking and blinking.

" _Here_ ," and Angie shoves water at his face and it's cold and wonderful but _fuck_ where did it come from, what if it's not clean? What's inside it? Metal and blood, vomit and filth.

Wait why does he suddenly care.

He sits up, feeling sick. He sputters out sickness and gasps and chokes and the voice swears. Thomas is leaning forward with his head down when cold wet spatters on his neck and back and the sudden cold is a kick hard enough that it forces him down into the suffocating, bug-crawling softness of the bed. His bed. The sick bed.

"Nnn," he managed, breathless and desert-cracked. "No get off get off don't touch me—"

"Thomas?—"

" _Don't touch me! I'll fucking_ —"

"Shit." Angelica bites the word. "Shit, your fever's tearing you up. Shit. Thomas I'm not touching you? See me not touching you? Could you stop, Thomas? Just, stop."  
Thomas stares wide-eyed at her empty hands, slick and shiny with maybe water, or maybe sweat, or slime. Something viscous and toxic. His eyes squeeze shut and he turns his head away.

______  
The pills are bitter and horrible and he spits them onto the carpet and scrubs the back of his arm across his mouth and hacks, and again, and then it doesn't stop and he's doubled over, a cold hand on his back as he coughs and gasps and struggles for air, and coughs again and the air won't come. Angelica moves, at some point, and then she's in front of him, holding on to wads of his shirt at the shoulders. Holding on while Thomas gasps and drags air in, slow and thin.

"Your fever needs to come down," She says again, "We've got to—just, come on."

Thomas barely managed to uncurl himself when a long arm with soft skin shoves under his shoulders and he's very nearly airborne, hauled to stand on trembling legs.

  
It's awkward and ungainly and they stumble together into the bathroom and the light roars on and Thomas flinches but she won't let him go.

Angelica spins the tap and the water screams into the bathtub, high and clear and glaring. He jerks away again— _no, the water's cold, but it's not clean, people die like this, he'll die he'll die, all over again_ —and Angelica clamps him tightly under his long arm and says,

"Dammit, settle the fuck down."

Thomas coughs again, weakly, shakes his head.

"Damn." His voice creaks. "Damnit no, I'm not gonna—it's two in the damn morning, I'm not—"

Angelica slams the tap off and it echoes through the walls. It grates his ears.

"We have sometime before we can go, if we don't do something _Now_.....", they're so close to going home, she doesn't want to spend the last days in a hospital. She growls, low and tight and is surprised when Thomas shifts away, a little, but she latches one arm on his bicep and the world fades to a point just where she's gripping. Her fingers, the pad of her thumb. The bones inside.

She bites out some more words but a huge white buzzing opens up and swallows them. Thomas looks up from his arm, looks for his partner, but can't find her face, her eyes. He feels his body step away from him for a moment and then a thin high whine kicks on from somewhere and then suddenly the walls are gone again.

_____

  
He's home now. They let them home early, clearly not expecting the job to take as short as time as it did for how long it took the other team. Or maybe it was because Angelica convinced them to let them skip the week-long waiting protocol to make sure the Spirit was truly dead and gone and let them go home early.

Thomas's hacking over the phone is probably what truly convinced them. He's certain of that.

Madison is worried. Thomas can see it in his face. Thomas has looked like utter shit since he had gotten back from his "business" trip. And if Angelica avoiding him like the plague he probably had, was bad enough, Madison is nearly twice as worse. Thomas is pretty sure he hasn't really seen hide or short hair of Madison since he's gotten back. Expect for the causal but far in between peeks into his bedroom too as Madison put it jokingly " _Make sure you haven't dropped dead yet_ "

Give it time-he thinks-sooner or later maybe. Maybe he'll die just curled up here on his bed. He hasn't really left it since he's gotten back four days ago and besides a beds a nice place to die. Soft and warm and comfortable and...

and Thomas is asleep again.

 _Shit_  
_______

  
He sits up hard, gasping, and his eyelids peel back and his eyes do their best to pop right out of his head.

The room is big and empty. No Madison. No anyone. Just Thomas, alone with the reek of his own sickness, the stink of his body breaking down.

He fumbles around, finds a washcloth and wipes at his face. It's cool but it's wrong, he realizes, anything could be on it, anything from the bed or the water or whatever, and now it's all over Thomas's face, burning and corrosive—God, he can feel it, stinging as it eats away at his skin. He drops the cloth and gets up, with difficulty, angles himself toward the gaping bathroom doorway.

The water from the sink's not much better, splashing all over fake porcelain, smearing in the light, halo-bright. He scrubs at his face, again and then again, at his arms and hands and neck, but it's no good. He can still feel it, the contamination from _everything_ , feel it on his skin, tight and tense as something burning, eating way at him, inside and out.

He starts scrubbing.

He doesn't stop.

_____

_Fuck  
Fuck Fuck!_

Her hands are gripping at the steering wheel. The word fuck repeating itself in her head more times then ever to the point she's pretty sure it'll be the only word she'll know for a while.

_He's gone_

He's gone. Those are the two words Angelica gets when she goes to check on her partner. The upside to living in the same city is the ability to check on one another and against her better judgement, Angelica found herself doing just that. Only to get those two little words the moment she knocks on the door.

The tired looking man who opens the door, opens it with a " _Where the hell have you been_..." only for the spark in his eye to die at the realization of it not being who he hopes on the opposite end of the door.

She doesn't recognize the man, but the man apparently recognizes her at first glance.

" _Angelica, Right_?"

She introduces herself as Thomas's business partner and the man believes it. She asks where Thomas is. She doesn't tell him she's here to check up on him, Just says she's here to pick up some stuff. Important Documents.

It works.

"Is he home?"

And the answer she gets makes her blood run cold. She doesn't expect it.

" _I was actually hoping you knew where he was."_

She's getting worried, but she keeps it professional. Clears her throat.

"Do you know where he is?"

" _Your guess is as good as mine_ "

The man then goes on to explain that since he's been home, Thomas had been acting funny. Refusing to touch anything or be touched by anything. Locking himself in his room for hours on end, which for a writer wouldn't be so rare if not for Thomas erratic behavior.

"Erratic?" She asks.

The man gives a sigh and looks up and down the street like they were being watched. He Tells her to come in. _Leave your shoes at the door_. They sit down on the couch in the middle of the living room and the man explains that sometime last night, he had heard the water running in the bathroom.

_I usually forget to shut the water off, plus Thomas' bedroom door was closed so I figured he was asleep. So I went to go turn it off. I walked into the bathroom to shut the water off and there's Thomas standing over the sink, sweating bullets, looking like he's seen a ghost_

Angelica was ashamed to say she chuckled at that one, but as she listened in on the story some more, she was taken back by what she heard.

According to the man, when he had found Thomas standing over the sink, Thomas had a small wad of steel wool in his hand he had taken from the kitchen and a canister of turpentine nearby that they had used when they had painted the bathroom a few months ago

Thomas, was apparently washing his hands with the turpentine, scrubbing at his hands with the steel wool to the point he was bleeding all over the sink. Now Angie wasn't stupid. Being in the business she was in, you tended to run into a lot of various chemicals and such that can help with your job, turpentine being one. It may had made a terrific flammable liquid for Salting and Burning, but when not careful, she knew exactly what turpentine could do to the body as well. Its vapors alone could irritate the skin and eyes, damage the lungs and respiratory system, or worse even the nervous system when inhaled. She didn't even wanna know what it could do to the skin when scrubbed by a man obviously not in his right mind.

_He must have caught me staring at him, cause then next thing I know he's bolting past me, getting blood all over the place, grabs his wallet then runs out the front door, and that was at least around Midnight last night. I figured he would be home by now._

_Around midnight_. Angelica looked at her watch, then at the clock on the cars radio. The numbers stared back at her at 12pm. Thomas had been gone for twelve hours. She doesn't know why she's making it her business to find him, but she finds herself parking the car in a alleyway. Digging around behind and underneath the drivers' side seat, she dug into the duffel bag she kept in the back. It was a while until her hand emerged with something the size and look of the old model Gameboy, the gray brick, but with a larger screen. She looked at the contraption skeptically, but pressing the 'on' button with stiff fingers, she pushed several buttons on the display, until a steady red 'bleep' appeared on the screen.

Bingo  
_______

  
The room was white.

Linoleum squares stretched across the floor in intricate patterns and bland crosses, while the walls remained obsolete behind an ivory shower and the dim glow of a lamp overhead. It was a safe looking room. Reflected sanctity, in a sense. Maybe even peace of mind.

"O-oh god..." Hunched over the ceramic sink, a lithe man scrubbed vehemently. The water is tepid, sluicing down Thomas's hands like a map to the most lucid colors the white room had ever seen before, and Thomas follows the rivulets with bleary eyes as they snake down the sink, and pause to pool along the grate. He's rubbing the soap over his hands again and again, letting the water become scalding as he tries to rid himself of the Germs. There's just... too much of it. He wants it all to go away.

The smack of Thomas' hands, one and then the other, against the wet edge of the sink echoes in the room, and Thomas can't help but frown at the emotions he can taste in his mouth. The desperate, broken noises he releases, almost willingly, as he watches more blood dribble over his irritated palms. He's bracing himself now, acknowledging the waves of nausea that threaten to toss bile into the mess; before he's once again stooping over. Scrubbing his injured hands.

And for a while, that's all he does.

The water runs clear. No matter how much and how hard he scrubbed, the liquid swirling down the drain lacked any trace of the dark colored spots on his hands. He didn't understand, couldn't comprehend how it was even possible. He could feel their bodies burning beneath his skin, mingling with and contaminating his own blood. He saw it on his knuckles every time he closed his eyes and felt them settle into the crescent grooves engraved on his palms, But no amount of rubbing or generic soap that was supposed to imitate a spring meadow could seem to pull them from his skin.

He rubbed until his hands were raw. The water turned red again. But it wasn't his blood he saw dripping down the drain. The palms and top of his hands stung but he didn't care, he wanted them off. They had to come off. But it doesn't seem to matter how hard he scrubs or how clean he is, or how chapped the skins on his fingers, his knuckles, his hands were becoming, the offending black spots never wash away.

  
The dots on his skin grow more numerous as he scrubs and rubs and practically tears the skin from his hands. His own blood leaking lazily into the water.

" _Thomas_ "

He tenses. He never even heard the door to the bathroom open. The steel-wool wad in one hand and soap in the other are gripped beneath his weary weak fingers as the voice pierces through his thoughts. It's firm and commanding and he knows without question who it is and what they want.

 _But don't_ _they know that the Black spots won't come off_?

His scrubbing doesn't slow and his teeth grit because he can hear the fall of footsteps get closer to him and he knows the other is going to stop him but he's not done because the spots are still on his hands.

He's suddenly worried how she'll react to the blood all over the sink, but the fear is gone as quickly as it grows. She can take it. She's probably seen worse.

It's okay if there's blood.

Red may spatter in the sink, but the water washes it away.

And if it can wash that away, surely it can wash away the black spots that dot his skin.

A hand falls on his shoulder and he almost falters. But the spots are not gone and even through the protests coming from his hands he continues to scrub because he's not going to stop until he's rid of them, even if he has to scrub away his own hands to stumps, to useless knobs of flesh and bone and—

"Thomas." The voice repeats and the hand grips his shoulder tighter. He can feel the press of a smaller body at his back as the other hand reaches around him, and settles on the hand that grips the cloth pressing to his skin. The thinner, smaller fingers curl around his, stop his movements and the abuse being dealt to his own hands. "Thomas. Enough. It's fine now. It's gone. See? Look. Look, it's not there, not anymore."

_Look, it's not there, not anymore._

But it _is_. He can see it, can't he? As he stares down at his hands who dwarf the other pair, the black spots are still there...black... filthy... even though it's not actually there, it still stains his hands and he needs to... _he has to_...

His hand flexes beneath the other's fingers wantonly, desperately wishing to start over. He doesn't know how she found him, but he'll be damned if she stops him from completing what he started and in one move Thomas entirely forces the hands holding onto him off.

He's not prepared to have the steel wool pad he brought from home with him, to fall from his hands with a wet _Sqwelch_ as he turns, or for the noise she makes when blood flies from Thomas' ruined skin and spatters across her face.

She reaches out, reaches for his hands, his arms maybe, and Thomas yanks them away and stumbles back until he feels pain in his lower back where it hits the sink hard.

" _Don't you—you don't fuckin' touch me, don't. You can't_ —"

"Don't" Thomas says again, or thinks he does, holding his hands out, warding her away. His skin's torn from the persistent scrubbing and abuse and his fingers tremble with the phantom rasp of metal on skin, scouring at tendons and knuckles and fingerprints, nails and veins and lifelines. Blood wells between two fingers and drips down, trailing from his wrist in a long thin line before it comes to a stop and drips off to the side in the middle of his arm

He doesn't even realize how her face collapses. Doesn't hear the "Thomas," she breathes, "Jesus, you...why would you...?"

" _Don't fucking touch me_ "

"What?" And she's confused cause she doesn't understand why. Her face is a mixture of confusion and cautious gentleness, like Thomas' losing his damn mind or something. Like he's an animal who's gonna freak out. But he's not. He's not.

He is

" _Get away from me_!" he snarls, winching his arms in, hands close to his body. As close as possible without touching. The pain is distant. The blood dripping from his fingers and wrists is cold. Angelica stands rooted to the ground, but He can see her nostrils flaring, can see she's trying to control herself.

"You're bleeding," Angelica says quietly, steadily. "You need to let me help you."

Thomas looks away, toward the wall. There's a thin smear of black in the corner, above the shower. Mold. Poison. It gets in the air. It gets in the lungs. It grows and it grows and it fills everything, every empty space, it chokes out air and blood and light. It kills. It's horrible and it's everywhere and _it's on him_.

His feet stumble over themselves suddenly and something hard hits his back, but it doesn't matter. It's not important. It's everything else that's important, everything on his skin, his hands and face. And now it's in his blood, black and rotting, worming inside, underneath, burrowing and tunneling. He yanks his hands away from his body and stares, trembling, something huge welling up in his throat. His mouth is open and there isn't any air. The blood from his hands is too dark. Much too dark. Not red but black, sticky and noxious. _Toxic_. Bubbling. The stink of decay hits him like a brick to the face. It's him. He's rotting. He's infected. His skin's full of holes, his skin's coming off, turning to liquid, foaming and fizzing.

Distantly he feels something hit his knees. The light reels. He grabs one hand with the other, nails digging in and he can see bone, punching through noxious chemical flesh, he can taste it on his tongue. Thick and viscous. He hears a noise, some scraping whine, and his throat aches with it.

When something grabs him he's not ready. Some huge horror latches onto his streaked, soaking wrists, and he's yanked forward violently, arms and body jerking. He can't get away. He can't get away. Whatever it is, it's too strong, holding on and tearing into his skin, and he pulls and pulls. The light strobes. He hears words, whispers. _Calm down, please calm down, you're making it worse. It's gonna be okay. It's gonna be okay. It's gonna be okay._

He wants to say something, to tell what or whoever it is who is touching him to fuck off and leave him. But all that comes out is a whining pant cause he's lost the will to speak, and all that happens is a hand comes up to his mouth so his sobs are muffled as he continues to pant and his body quivers pathetically.

He spits and snarls, wrenches backward, thrashing, heels digging into the tile. Warm wetness bubbles from his mouth—froth, or blood, or worse. He pants through his teeth, rasping noises that don't sound like him. He's coming apart. Everything's coming apart. His wrists are slippery. He yanks, hard as he can, and there's a sharp cry. The world pitches away and his head cracks into something hard and ringing, a solid bell, a single tone, a cry across an empty sky. Light peals across his vision and his body disintegrates, there in that moment, and silence blossoms in its place.

______

  
The TV's on when he opens his eyes.

He blinks, blearily, at the pale pillowcase a hairsbreadth from his eye. Light flickers blue and grey and stuttering. Cartoons.

He blinks. Daffy Duck's voice swells and fades.

_After all, it was me or him, and obviously, it couldn't be me..._

"Ughh," his mouth makes noises of its own accord. He smacks his lips around the sticky, horrible taste. His mouth tastes like sandpaper and he's got a horrid headache but his throat doesn't hurt anymore, so he guess's that's a plus.

There's a clatter, the noise of a body moving suddenly.

"Bout time your sorry ass woke up." A heavy hand falls on his shoulder, and Thomas doesn't flinch this time. There's a moment, suspended in the little room, when it's nothing but him and this person in a small quiet space. The low light of the television and blue shadows on the walls.

And then the pain when he tries to sit up with his hands and the memory, comes back.

"Oh," he says, eyes squeezing shut as he curls around his hands, "Oh Jesus, oh _fuck_."

"Yeah," Angelica says surprisingly sympathetic, "It, uh—it's kinda gory."

"Jeezus. Why the _hell_ did I...?" he gasps. His hands twitch and even that slight movement sends agony through his skin, spiderwebbing through tendons and muscles, stabbing up his arms. A dull, sympathetic ache murmurs from the back of his skull and he can't find the wherewithal to pry his eyes open again.

"Why—what, what the hell happened?" His voice comes out plaintive, and small.

  
Angelica sighs, And Thomas bites the inside of his cheek and breathes through his nose. He remembers, in a distant way, the moment in the bathroom when stripping his skin off with a steel wool pad seemed like the best idea in the world, but he has no idea where that particular insanity originated.

"It, uh—" she pauses. Thomas hears her lick her lips. "It wasn't just a fever. Or...flu. I mean I knew you were sick. I thought it was just...I thought you were just freaking out from the fever. I'm...but it wasn't. I mean maybe that was part of it, but...I think you picked up something. From Jamie's mom. In the morgue. You know?

"What..." saliva is pooling in his mouth, nausea in his gut. He swallows, and again, manages a slurred mumble.

Angelica says something in response, explains that while Thomas may have gotten sick even before all this shit started, that something from their case infected him as well. Had made everything worse.

"I called nearly every superior I knew trying to figure out what it was. And apparently what you got was so rare even they had no idea it truly existed."

She went on to explain to him about something called "Ghost Sickness" and Thomas wanted to chuckle, not because it sounded stupid but because that had to be the most tamest of shitting names to give what he just went through.

"Apparently you have to come in contact with the ghosts body or the body of another victim of ghost sickness. In this case it just so happened to be that woman in the morgue."

Thomas side-eyes her suspiciously

"Then why didn't you get sick, you were there too"

"According to HQ, not everyone is susceptible to the virus. You just happened to get lucky"

She bites her tongue

"Erh...unlucky I meant"

Thomas wants to retort, but loses his voice in a sudden stab from his hands. He makes another noise, something like a whine, though he'll never admit it, and the hands grip tightens on his shoulder.

"You're gonna be okay, its passed now" he hears, faintly, and then something about _painkillers_ and _lying low_ and _time to heal_ , _be fine_. "I called your house, told that guy...Madison, you'd be home soon."

It all runs together in a blur and at the mention of Madison, he's choking and Angelica starts swearing and there's the clang of a metal garbage tin, the sound of spitting and the smell of vomit and he just wants to be unconscious again, because he's _forgotten_ Madison and it makes him feel _guilty_ beyond every fathom of belief to suddenly realize what he probably put his oldest friend through.

He hung his head low as Angelica went on rambling about what she had learned about Ghost sickness. She never even realized he had fallen asleep again.  
______

  
He opens his eyes to a quiet sunrise peeking around the curtains. The smell of vomit is gone. His hands are a trembling mass of dark red pain on the ends of his arms. Angelica's asleep, propped up against the bed, hair crazy. She smells faintly of smoke again.

 _There oughta be a law_ , he thinks vaguely. He grits his teeth and manages to shift an arm without brushing his bandaged hand against the comforter. _A fucking law against...against dead people giving ya shit. Shit._

He gets his hand as close to Angelica's head as he can manage without actually touching her. He can feel his fingers trembling in their cocoon of white, but the bandages give an illusion of stillness.

He wants to wake her. Thomas wants painkillers. He wants water. He wants to hack his goddamn hands off and shower until the end of time, and he wants out of this room that smells of stale sickness and smoke, and turpentine and laundry detergent, and blood. He really wants a glass of water. Oh God, does he want a glass of water.

But she's asleep. It's eight in the morning and Angelica's out cold on the floor, head on the bed, facing the tv. Thomas creeps his fingers a little closer tentatively. The pain from the movement washes over and through him. He clenches his jaw and shuts his eyes and swallows the noise he wants to make, and when he opens his eyes again, she still dead to the world and Thomas has his bandaged hand as close to her head as he can get. The tips of his fingers that aren't bandaged, barely touch her head, but gently touch at her hair.

He smiles faintly.

He lets her sleep.

 

 


End file.
